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Thursday, 22 December 2011 02:04 PM EST
BP Plc is exiting the solar business after 40 years, countering a trend led by Google Inc., Warren Buffett and Total SA of investing in the industry just as competition drives down the cost of sun-based power.
Europe's second-largest oil company will wind down the unit over several months because it has become unprofitable, BP Solar Chief Executive Officer Mike Petrucci told staff in an internal letter last week. About 100 employees will be affected.
BP Solar is withdrawing from an industry that's facing oversupply and price pressures after Chinese competitors increased production. Total, Europe's third-biggest oil company, Buffett and Google have entered the industry with investments over the last six months to take advantage of attractive tax breaks, declining costs and a source of power hedged against high fossil-fuel prices.
BP's move is an anomaly with more companies trying to get involved than are getting out, said Paul Leming, an analyst with Ticonderoga Securities LLC analyst in New York.
"Two of the biggest oil companies have taken the opposite approaches," Leming said in a phone interview. "The move toward alternative energy continues to be a well-recognized megatrend."
BP's solar equipment venture in India with Tata Power Co. is conducting "business as usual," K. Subramanya, chief executive of Tata BP Solar India Ltd., said today by phone. BP owns 51 percent of India's third-biggest cell and panel maker. Tata Power, the utility arm of the industrial company that owns Corus Group and Jaguar Land Rover, declined to comment.
'Pretty Dire'
"I can't speak on behalf of my shareholders," Subramanya said from Bangalore. "All I can say is we continue to conduct our business capably and actively."
BP, an early entrant into the business, found it difficult compete against newer rivals, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said in a note to clients today.
"Manufacturing is looking pretty dire for everyone, and BP was outpaced by faster moving pure-plays years ago," the London-based researcher said. While its move to diversify from manufacturing into building plants was more successful, "BP had no obvious competitive advantage apart from access to finance," it said.
Panel prices plunged 48 percent this year, helping tip three U.S. makers including Solyndra LLC into bankruptcy. Solon SE, Germany's first listed solar company, filed for insolvency last week.
'Making It Difficult'
"The continuing global economic challenges have significantly impacted the solar industry, making it difficult to sustain long-term returns for the company," Petrucci said in the letter to staff.
BP Solar stopped most of its manufacturing in early 2009, closing several factories in Spain and shedding 480 jobs after the Spanish market froze, triggering the solar industry's first period of strong oversupply. Tata BP's Subramanya declined to say at what capacity the India plants are producing equipment.
In July, BP Solar decided to quit manufacturing entirely and focus on developing large projects. It no longer has manufacturing plants, Robert Wine, a spokesman for the London- based parent, said today by phone.
BP Solar plans to sell its stakes in the more than 158 megawatts of projects it's developed with local partners in countries including Italy, Spain, Germany, Britain and the U.S. The decision will not affect BP's other renewable energy units, which include wind power and biofuels, Wine said.
SunPower, Buffett
Paris-based Total bought a 60 percent stake in SunPower Corp., which makes panels, in April as high natural-gas prices in Europe and increasing concerns about nuclear power sparked interest in clean energy.
Buffett's MidAmerican Energy Holdings agreed this month to buy a $2 billion solar project under development in California and a 49 percent stake in a $1.8 billion plant in Arizona. Generous solar tax credits valid to 2015 may have lured the billionaire investor, who already owns wind farms, into his first solar foray, Gerard Reid, an analyst at Jefferies International Ltd., said on Dec. 7.
Google announced an agreement yesterday with the private equity firm KKR & Co. to invest in four California solar plants, bringing the owner of the most popular Internet search engine's total investment in clean-energy projects to $915 million, according to a statement.
Global investment in renewable energy was $195 billion in 2010 and is expected to more than double to $395 billion in 2020, according to BNEF.
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Variety is the spice of life–it's also what gets our muscles growing again when we hit a plateau. Muscle growth is a reaction of the stress of weightlifting. Muscles grow during the recovery phase in an effort to be "prepared" the next time you lift a heavy weight. The problem is that when our muscles get accustomed to our training routines, our gains first slow to a trickle, then stop entirely.
That's why you want to mix up your routine every once in a while–to keep the muscles guessing by introducing something new that will cause a growth reaction. So that brings us to Rest-Pause Training, a great–but brutal–way to really push your muscles to failure and break through the occasional wall.
In everyday bodybuilding workouts you do a movement for 8-12 reps, then rest for about a minute before moving on to the next set. Using this strategy, the amount of weight you're lifting each time is less than what you're really capable of lifting, which enables you to do multiple reps. The rest period between sets gives your muscles time to recharge before you start lifting again.
The time spent resting also gives your muscles a chance to flush out the lactic acid. Lactic acid builds up when the muscles are really stressed, causing the burning sensation deep inside muscle tissue. Depending on the weight, speed and number of reps you're doing, eventually you'll get to a point of failure where your muscles can't perform the movement any more.
The point of Rest-Pause Training is to hyper stimulate the muscles to failure, giving them just enough time to "catch their breath" again before you hit them again. Rest-Pause Training takes advantage of the body's ability to recover quickly from a stressful situation. The body is able to quickly regain some of its strength by flooding the muscle fibers with a substance known as phosphocreatine. This compound provides the energy source the muscle needs to quickly flush out the lactic acid and get back to work. Rest-Pause Training takes advantage of this process and uses it to help you push through the wall and hit the gains you want.
So here's how it works. I want to warn you though that this routine can be brutal.
The object is to push your muscles to absolute failure and then with as little rest as possible, push them to the limit again. When you do Rest-Pause Training, always be sure to have someone spot you. Start with a weight that is about 90% your one-rep max–the highest amount of weight you can lift for a single rep.
Perform a single rep, rack the weight, rest for 10-15 seconds and then do another rep. Keep doing this until your muscles fail entirely and you can't do another rep and your muscles feel like spaghetti–that's why you always want to be sure to have someone spot you when doing this.
If you're a beginner or just don't feel that you're quite up to a full Rest-Pause Training jump just yet, you can do a modified version to build yourself up for the real thing. In this version you won't use your one-rep max but just a heavier weight than normal–maybe about 75%-80% of your max.
As you perform the movement, rest about one to three seconds between each rep. Keep doing this until your muscles hit failure. This is your first set. Then, rack the weight, rest 10-15 seconds and start over again. When you've hit the point where you can't even do a single rep, you're finished. As you get more comfortable doing this, increase the weight until you feel you're ready to make the leap into full Rest-Pause-Training.
Another variation is to start with your one-rep max but rest 15-30 seconds between each rep, shortening the rest time as you progress until you get to the 10-15 second mark.
Because this is so intense and you are working with weights that are much heavier than what you normally lift, be sure that you are sufficiently warmed up before diving in. The purpose of Rest-Pause training is to push yourself to the breaking point. If you're not properly warmed up and prepared, you could really injure yourself. A good way to make sure you are ready is to make your last set a Rest-Pause set. Besides, after doing Rest-Pause your muscles aren't going to be in any shape to be doing much more serious lifting so it's best to use that to your advantage.
You can train any body part using Rest-Pause Training and can do it with just about any movement that you perform. It's great for arms, legs, back, chest or any area where you feel like you've hit a wall or a plateau. But because it's so intense, don't use it more than once a week on each muscle group, or for longer than eight weeks. Otherwise, you risk over-training and you don't want that.
This is just one of several techniques you can use that are outlined in the new Critical Bench Program 2.0 that is set to be released this fall.

subset: commoncrawl


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Everyone knew that House Republicans wanted to force a committee vote to hold Eric Holder in contempt of Congress—and that they had the votes to do it.
What nobody expected was that President Obama would invoke executive privilege minutes before the scheduled vote, raising the stakes to a full-blown constitutional clash.
The result was yet another war of words on the Hill, with Democrats closing ranks behind the attorney general, and his boss.
The partisan standoff exploded into to a full-blown political showdown Wednesday when Republicans on the House Oversight Committee voted to hold Holder in contempt for failing to turn over thousands of subpoenaed documents related to the Fast and Furious gun walking operation. Minutes before the committee met, the White House asserted its executive privilege to keep the documents private, while House Speaker John Boehner announced that the full House will vote next week to cite Holder for contempt, a move that has never been taken against a sitting U.S. attorney general.
The dramatic turn of events came as the committee voted along party lines against Holder after a marathon six-hour hearing that devolved into a polarized slug fest, with Democrats accusing the GOP of conducting an election-year witch hunt against Holder and Republicans asking what the attorney general and president were trying to hide with Obama's move to keep the missing documents privileged within the White House.
Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle, a freshman Republican who voted to hold Holder in contempt, called the White House's assertion of executive privilege "sickening."
"What I want to know is, what is he trying to hide?" she asked.
Later in the hearing, Rep. Elijah Cummings jumped to Holder's defense, calling Holder's decision to withhold documents an effort to protect the office of the attorney general, not to protect his own political hide, as Republicans implied again and again while they accused Holder of conducting a cover-up in the Fast and Furious investigation.
"What is he hiding?" Cummings asked. "I don't think he's hiding a damn thing."
Wednesday's fireworks were evidence that both Democrats and Republicans see the standoff as more politically damaging to the other side than to their own.
Boehner wasted no time taking the unprecedented step of scheduling a vote in the full House to cite Holder for contempt. Although Boehner had not been pushing the issue forward, rank and file GOP members have been clamoring to vote against Holder and the White House to show their conservative constituents they are holding the Obama administration's feet to the fire on something. The Fast and Furious investigation has been a mainstay on conservative talk radio and blogs since 2010, when guns from the botched gun walking operation were found at the scene of the murder of an American Border Patrol agent.
"Citizens in my district are wondering why we have been so gracious in the time length that we have pursued this Fast and Furious issue," Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) said. "Contrary to what the attorney general seems to think, complying with the committee's subpoena is not optional."
For her part, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi essentially called next week's House vote a waste of time. "I think it's just the irresponsibility of the Republicans. We want jobs. Why are they spending this time doing this?"
A senior Democratic House leadership aide compared the Holder investigation to the debt ceiling debate from last year as an example of Republican overreach. "It's another manufactured crisis," the aide said. "It's a witch hunt and it really undermines the House as an institution."
The investigation into Operation Fast and Furious began 16 months ago when House and Senate Republicans launched an inquiry into the botched probe and Republican Rep. Darrell Issa subpoenaed Holder to turn over all of the documents related to the operation. Although the Department of Justice turned over more than 7,000 pages of materials, Holder withheld tens of thousands more, on the basis that they related to ongoing prosecutions or internal White House deliberations.
Tuesday night, as the committee vote on contempt came closer, there was an effort at some old-fashioned backroom horse-trading. Holder met with the leadership and pushed for a deal. "We made what we thought was a reasonable offer and they did not approve," a senior Justice Department official told The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity.
One key point of confusion is whether Republicans are now saying that invoking "executive privilege" implies that the White House was involved in the disputed communications with the DOJ. In other words, did the White House get involved with the more recent disputed documents? In a statement, Issa said "executive privilege only applies to materials that directly pertain to communications with the president and his senior advisers."
Democrats and the Justice Department disagree. They argue that it is "executive branch" privilege, rather than a presidential privilege. Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.) told The Daily Beast that Republicans have previously agreed the privilege can apply to departments in the executive branch. He cited Michael Mukasey, an attorney general under George W. Bush, who he said had argued that "a president can invoke executive privilege for those in his administration that need to be protected from public disclosure so he can have a full and vigorous debate."
If the full House votes next week to hold the attorney general in contempt for withholding the documents, Holder's case would be referred to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Ronald Machen, an Obama appointee who once worked for Holder when Holder himself served as the U.S. Attorney for the District.
But that is the point where constitutional law experts say the proceedings against Holder would likely die, not because of Machen's relationship with Holder, but because no precedent exists for prosecuting an administration official when the White House has invoked executive privilege over the documents that would be necessary for a grand jury investigation.
Peter Shane, a law professor who studies the Constitutional separation of powers at Ohio State University, said House Republicans could potentially move to sue the administration in district court or subject Holder to its own civil arrest, but Shane called both scenarios extremely unlikely.
In a city as partisan as Washington, Holder's political support on Capitol Hill is just as important as anything a grand jury or civil court might do in the future. By Wednesday night, it was clear that Holder has the full support of Congressional Democrats for now. Although Republicans have called for the attorney general to resign, no Democrat has come out against him. Instead, top Democrats have rallied to his side, defending him as working in good faith to give Issa what he can in a highly-charged political environment. With Democrats still in control of the Senate and supporting Obama, there is little more that House Republicans can do beyond next week's vote to compel Holder or the president to do anything.
The unmistakable take away for the White House is that Democrats in the House and Senate are standing by Obama, a rare message of unity that the president has hardly gotten at any other point in his administration.
—The Daily Beast's Daniel Stone contributed to this article.


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The Raleigh RSW Compact
In the '60s, Moulton bicycles were hot in England, and Raleigh wanted to get in on the action. One of their answers to the Moulton was the RSW (Raleigh Small Wheels).
This met with some success as a town/shopping bike. Although it lacked the suspension of the Moultons, it used wide (2") balloon tires to smooth the ride.
The original RSW was soon followed by the folding RSW Compact, which had a very easy to use folding mechanism for the frame and handlebars, allowing it to fit into the boot (trunk) of a small British car.
I owned one for a while, but found it too heavy and slow for my liking, so I sold it.
Here are some pictures of mine:


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Pure Beef author and Slow Food missionary Lynne Curry talks about her upcoming Lostine Tavern, grass-fed burgers, and the challenges of locavore cooking in Eastern Oregon. Published Apr 21, 2014, 3:12pm By Benjamin Tepler Image: Anna M. Campbell Photography Lynne Curry with her grass-fed cattle. Next month, grass-fed beef expert and Slow Food missionary Lynne Curry will open Eastern Oregon's first farm-to-table restaurant. Curry is best known for her 2012 handbook,Pure Beef, a guide to happy, grass-fed meat, and spent her formative years cooking at the Willows Inn on Lummi Island, and the Herbfarm in Seattle. Now Curry is reaching deep into Eastern Oregon's network of farmers and ranchers to resurrect the recently shuttered Lostine Tavern, a local landmark 15 minutes from Enterprise, Oregon. We sat down with the local foods pioneer to talk about the renovated, 51-seat restaurant and bar, slated to open on May 15. For those of us who never make it passed Hood River, what's the big deal with Lostine Tavern? The Lostine Tavern is right on highway 82, which leads from La Grande up into the Wallowa Mountains and the wilderness; anyone who's passed through the Valley has a story about stopping at the LT for a burger and beer. It was built in 1902 as a pharmacy and doctors office, and then it was an old-school soda fountain. In the 1940's it became a tavern and an Eastern Oregon landmark. I've heard stories of ranchers who rode their horses there back in the day, and barely made it home after one too many drinks. We've actually received a grant from Oregon's Historic Preservation Office to help restore the original 1902 façade, Do you really think Eastern Oregon is ready for a farm-to-table restaurant? It's going to be farm-to-table, but it's not going to be fancy. We depend on locals for everything, and we want to cultivate it as the place where people can gather from all ends of the valley. Before it closed, it wasthe place where people congregated for pie socials, community groups, and sports rallies. It's also a destination: the Wallowas are one of Oregon's Seven Wonders after all! We envision the LT as a place where visiting Portland chefs can do a dinner or teach a cooking class. It's a great opportunity for people to do a little culinary tourism. That said, the vibe will be of the place; you are allowed to walk in with cow patties stuck to your boots. As the unofficial expert on grass-fed beef, is it safe to say we'll see it on your new menu? It's sort of in my blood, yeah. We'll definitely have a great burger on a homemade bun with fries—an essential for people coming out of the wilderness. But a lot of the menu is going to center on our deli, where we are making our own grass-fed corn beef and pastrami and pickles and homemade soda. We'll be making our own sourdough too…think sourdough chicken and waffles. The other big focus is local produce: great salads, nettles, chokecherries, and sorrel. Again, it's not going to be plated food, but if morels find their way into a skillet-baked pot pie, that would be great. Basically, I want it to feel like a deluxe mining camp. Lostine Tavern's 1902 facade. Eastern Oregon is known for its cattle ranches and wheat fields…what sort of role will local farms play on your menu? Lostine is actually a food desert: we don't have a supply chain here. We can't just call someone up or go to a farmers market. There are tons of great farms out here, but good luck getting even a single bail of hay locally. That's the big irony of the rural West. It's way more legwork than if a Portland chef wanted to open a farm-to-table restaurant. We are trying to jumpstart something here, a way for people in Eastern Oregon to get local beef, chicken, eggs, greens, and grains. That's the bigger vision. I'm lining up my people. We'll be getting meat from Carman Ranch, 6 Ranch, chicken from Mary Hawkins, and produce from Beth Giban's Backyard Gardens in Joseph and more. We also have plans for our own garden, a pig and a few chickens. Lostine Tavern 125 Oregon 82, Lostine, OR Opening May 15 for lunch and dinner
I think I'll have to wait until they expand into mail order. Wish I lived closer, it would be a well worth it stop.
If you are going thru LaGrande, you MUST stop at "Neil's In & Out" and sample one of their MilkShakes, and a big batch of Curly Fries..... I like the Chocolate/PeatnutButter Shake, myself.... It is a MUST Stop for my family, going back two generations. .....
In Kinston NC try the Farmer and the Chef local farm fresh food since 2006 Our Farmers – Chef & the Farmer


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1. Arrive a few minutes before class. Please note: absolutely no late entries are permitted.
2. No cell phones are permitted in the studio. Please leave them in a cubby or in the car.
3. Our yoga studio are quiet zones. That means no talking before, during, or after class. You are welcome to visit with friends in the lounge or boutique.
4. Casa Yoga has a no children policy. Due to liability, we do not allow children to wait in the lobby while parents are in class, under any circumstances.
5. Show up to class clean (no make-up), fragrance free & smoke free.
6. Hydrate before, during and after class. Avoid eating 2 hours before class.
7. Please try to remain in the yoga room from beginning to end. Should you feel dizzy or overheated, try restring for a moment on your mat. Should you need to, please exit quietly without distracting others.
8. Please store your belongings in the cubbies outside of studio and leave your valuables at home.
9. Please let your instructor know of any injuries or physical restrictions before class.
10. Pricing, classes, and instructors are subject to change without notice.


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KALAMAZOO—Western Winds, a faculty and graduate student ensemble in Western Michigan University's School of Music, will perform its first concert of 2013 at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 5, in the Dalton Center Recital Hall. The concert is free and open to the public.
The ensemble is conducted by Dr. Robert Spradling, who will retire later this year. It was recently announced that Spradling's replacement will be WMU alumnus Dr. Scott Boerma, currently director of marching and athletic bands at the University of Michigan.
The Feb. 5 program will include Richard Strauss' "Vienna Philharmonic Fanfare," Robert Kurka's suite from the opera "The Good Soldier Schweik," and Igor Stravinsky's "Symphonies of Wind Instruments." The evening will also feature performances by the Graduate Wind and Brass Quintets.
For more information about the concert, visit wmich.edu/music.


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Queen legend Roger Taylor has been announced as Guildford's Academy of Contemporary Music's new Patron for Music.
He joins the Academy alongside Patron for Industry, respected music executive Nigel Elderton, and Patron for Education, the esteemed Lord Lingfield.
Roger said: "I am delighted and honoured to be a patron of the Academy of Contemporary Music. Amazing places like this didn't exist when we were learning to be a group.
"I can't imagine the impact it would have had: I guess we would have been a whole lot better. I wish all students at least some of the luck, life and career that I have had!"
Julia Leggett, Executive Director at ACM, added: "Roger embodies everything about ACM, from his passion for performing, to the talent and hard graft on which he has built his astonishing career."
For more on Roger's incredible career pick up the August issue of Rhythm, where you'll find a huge cover interview with the Queen man. For more on ACM head here.


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emoto captured and visualised the global response around the London 2012 Olympic Games on Twitter in an interactive online visualisation and physical data sculpture
In the online visualisation, we have created two different perspectives onto the data. Using a combination of two interactive views, users were able to explore the ebbs and flows of discussions online. The Topics View, focused on communicating how much positive or negative attention each event, athlete or social topic was generating at each moment and over time. The anecdotal and ephemeral was seen in the Message Stream View which showed Tweets in real-time as they were posted around the world.
The core of the installation is a physical data sculpture consisting of 17 objects, each representing all Tweets we have collected during one day of the Olympics. Mapped onto this physical sculpture we have then projected individual heat maps for the most interesting themes we have identified while observing emoto during the Games. Users were able to navigate through these themes using an interactive controller and thus explore our archive. The second key element in the installation was the 9.50 meter long Sentigraph representing giving a high-level overview over London2012 as seen by emoto.
In addition, we continuously analyzed the data gathered (12 million English tweets with sentiment values) and documented our findings on the emoto blog.
This research report (pdf) charts the development and release of the emoto project, and positions it in relation to current debates on data and visualisation.
Published in the proceedings of ISEA2013, Sydney.
We also supplied the collected data to the Data Science Laboratory of the ISI Foundation. As a result of the collaboraton, the EMOTO Topic Explorer is an exploratory tool designed to expose the topical and temporal dimensions of Twitter conversations. Grouping thousand of tweets into thematic clusters, the interface provides an overview of online discussions and of collective attention flow over time. Try out the online version to see what topics were discussed on Twitter during the Olympics, zoom in on the salient moments, and understand how the contributions and interest differ across the nationalities.
For any further questions, please contact the team at firstname.lastname@example.com


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by Robert A. Muenchen
[Since this was originally published in 2014, I've collected new data that renders this article obsolete. You can always see the most recent data here. -Bob Muenchen]Here is my latest update to The Popularity of Data Analysis Software. To save you the trouble of reading all 25 pages of that article, the new section is below. The two most interesting nuggets it contains are:
- As I covered in my talk at the UseR 2014 meeting, it is very likely that during the summer of 2014, R became the most widely used analytics software for scholarly articles, ending a spectacular 16-year run by SPSS.
- Stata has probably passed Statistica in scholarly use, and its rapid rate of growth parallels that of R.
If you'd like to be alerted to future updates on this topic, you can follow me on Twitter, @BobMuenchen.
Scholarly Articles
The more popular a software package is, the more likely it will appear in scholarly publications as a topic and as a method of analysis. The software that is used in scholarly articles is what the next generation of analysts will graduate knowing, so it's a good leading indicator of where things are headed. Google Scholar offers a way to measure such activity. However, no search of this magnitude is perfect and will include some irrelevant articles and reject some relevant ones. The details of the search terms I used are complex enough to move to a companion article, How to Search For Analytics Articles. Since Google regularly improves its search algorithm, I recollect the data for all years following the protocol described at http://librestats.com/2012/04/12/statistical-software-popularity-on-google-scholar/.
Figure 2a shows the number of articles found for each software package for all the years that Google Scholar can search. SPSS is by far the most dominant package, likely due to its balance between power and ease-of-use. SAS has around half as many, followed by MATLAB and R. Note that the general purpose software MATLAB, Java and Python are included only when found in combination with analytics terms, so view those as much rougher counts than the rest. Neither C nor C++ are included here because it's very difficult to focus the search compared to the search for jobs above, whose job descriptions commonly include a clear target of skills in "C/C++" and "C or C++".
From RapidMiner on down, the counts appear to be zero. That's not the case, but relative to the others, it might as well be.
Figure 2b shows the number of articles for the most popular six classic statistics packages from 1995 through 2013 (the last complete year of data this graph was made). As in Figure 2a, SPSS has a clear lead, but you can see that its dominance peaked in 2007 and its use is now in sharp decline. SAS never came close to SPSS' level of dominance, and it peaked in 2008.
Since SAS and SPSS dominate the vertical space in Figure 2a by such a wide margin, I removed those two packages and added the next two most popular statistics packages, Systat and JMP in Figure 2c. Freeing up so much space in the plot now allows us to see that the use of R is experiencing very rapid growth and is pulling away from the pack, solidifying its position in third place. In fact, extending the downward trend of SPSS and the upward trend of R make it likely that sometime during the summer of 2014 R became the most dominant package for analytics used in scholarly publications. Due to the lag caused by the publication process, getting articles online, indexing them, etc. we won't be able to verify that this has happened until well into 2015 (correction: this said 2014 when originally posted).
After R, Statistica is in fourth place and growing, but at a much lower rate. Note that in the plots from previous years, Statistica was displayed as a flat line at the very bottom of the graph. That turned out to be a search-related artifact. Many academics who use Statistica don't mention the package by software name but rather say something like, "we used the statistics package by Statsoft."
Extrapolating from the trend lines, it is likely that the use of Stata among academics passed that of Statistica fairly early in 2014. The remaining three packages, Minitab, Systat and JMP are all growing but at a much lower rate than either R or Stata.


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Business Mandarin Collar Polo Shirt
Simple yet stylish, the Business Mandarin Collar Polo Shirt is a true wardrobe staple. This men's shirt comes in a slim fit to offer a stylish look and feel. Perfect for pulling on when you have a busy morning ahead.
- Mandarin collar
- Four-button front placket,
- Contrast buttons and collar trim
- Long sleeves
- Slim fit
- Material: 95% cotton 5% spandex
For a slimmer fit, we recommend choosing one size down.


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We are so excited to finally show this AMAZING photo shoot and our restyled Lollipop Party Collection with you! Laura of Laura Winslow Photography contacted me about a shoot she was working on for Classy Sassy Girls at Smeeks Candy Shop in Phoenix! All she had to say was CANDY and I was in! It was the perfect opportunity to revamp our oh-so-popular Lollipop Party Collection and set the stage for the adorable Classy Sassy Girls clothing! Everything turned out fabulous....check it all out!
I had such a great time working on this!
A huge thank you to all of the vendors involved in this shoot!
Photography :: Laura Winslow
Party Designs/Styling :: The TomKat Studio
Clothing :: Classy Sassy Girls
Cakes, Cupcakes & Cookies :: Decadent Delights
Hair Accessories :: Vintage Rose Wraps
Polka Dot Balloons :: Polka Dot Market
Venue/Candy :: Smeeks
The NEW Lollipop Collection is available in
The Full Printable Lollipop Collection is 40% off until 11/7/10
You can order now and we will hold until you are ready for your party!
A big thank you to Andrea & Serena for your help the day of the shoot!


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(Photo: M.Andersen/BikePortland)
No candidate for mayor is thinking bigger than Sarah Iannarone.
"The rest of the world is watching what we do right now and following our lead, whether we like it or not. Which means you model behavior even if sometimes it's challenging. Which means, one, that we're going to stop subsidizing the automobile."
— Sarah Iannarone
That's not just because of her policy proposals, like making part of downtown Portland car-free within 10 years or doing an experimental road diet on SE 82nd Avenue. It's that Iannarone sees Portland as a city of global importance: a city that must be on its "best behavior" (as she puts it) because it has a special responsibility as an example to the world.
Though her opponents Ted Wheeler and Jules Bailey have been more frequently described as seeing City Hall as a step to other jobs, Iannarone is at least as ambitious as they are. In our March 16 interview, she casually mentioned a scenario where she were Oregon's governor (breaking the narrative of the "urban-rural divide" would be among her goals, she said) and made clear at several points that she sees good governance in Portland as a way to effect change worldwide.
Iannarone's wide lens fits her day job: she's the No. 2 at First Stop Portland, which shows off Portland's highlights to visitors from around the world. Her boss in that job: Nancy Hales, the sitting mayor's wife and one of her largest donors in this campaign.
That link has led some to see Iannarone as a stand-in for departing Mayor Charlie Hales. Others, looking at her lack of prior political office, suspect she might be a policy lightweight.
But Iannarone, who has spent years as a volunteer on various city committees, is not light on policy. If anything, she has the opposite problem: Her detailed ideas about Portland's future sometimes come tumbling faster than she can modulate them. In our talk, she sometimes veered midsentence from subject to subject, or from sky-high concept to block-level specifics.
Those connections can sometimes be hard to follow, in part because she has a conversational tic of beginning policy proposals with a variation on the phrase "what does it mean if…" but failing to actually answer her own question. On the other hand, for someone whose campaign aims to expand the scope of the possible, maybe that's appropriate.
It's also worth noting here that Iannarone was endorsed last week by Bike Walk Vote PAC, an independent political committee.
Here were our big takeaways from a one-hour conversation with Iannarone:
• More than any leading candidate, Iannarone's transportation policy is built on the belief that mass transit, biking and walking are good for the economy. She describes the notion of any tradeoff between business growth and sustainable transportation as a misperception.
• Like all the leading candidates, she supports the city's proposed 10-cent gas tax. Unlike others, she thinks it should be extended another four years after its first four are up, to buy more time for a shift to a vehicle-miles-traveled tax at the state level.
• If she had her druthers, no more than half of the gas tax would go to pavement maintenance (the actual ratio is about 56 "maintenance," 44 "safety"). Like all the leading canddiates, she feels bike infrastructure is underfunded in the plan.
• Iannarone, who lives near 80th and Foster, personally participated in a demonstration for a new crosswalk there. She said she is terrified that her daughter will be hurt by someone driving carelessly on Foster.
• Like Bailey, she frequently bikes to work. Unlike any leading candidate, she has lived for years in Portland as a working mother without owning a car.
• Like all the leading candidates, her top priority for bike infrastructure is East Portland. She feels relatively low-cost solutions like jersey barriers along bike lanes would greatly improve transportation there. For closer-in neighborhoods, she favors the sort of bike infrastructure changes that require a "can of paint and political will."
• Iannarone feels that despite the citywide affordability crisis, central Portland does not have a worse affordability problem if you look at housing costs in combination with its lower transportation costs. "If I walk two minutes to work and then I have eight modes of transit, including car-share, Lyft and Uber within a minute of my smartphone, of course my transportation costs are going to be minimal."
• She is very clear about opposing any net public subsidies for driving or parking. But she seems open to publicly financing parking garages if the city expects them to be self-supporting, and she also describes the Orange Line's Tacoma Street Station park and ride, where transit riders park free, as a model, though she wishes it could have been bigger.
• On development issues, she supports internal home divisions and multiple ADUs in R5 zones but prefers to focus much more development on centers and corridors. For example, she said she could imagine Montavilla getting 20-story apartment buildings like the Lloyd District within 10 years.
Want to dig into Iannarone's thoughts yourself? Listen to a recording of our conversation below (the audio improves after the first minute) or read the lightly edited transcript below.
What made you want to run? What do you see as the big story you're trying to tell and the themes of your your race?
I don't want Portland to be passe. We saw that article by Carrie Bye in the Willamette Week a couple months ago: "I'm leaving Portland, here's why." I don't want those kind of stories. I just had a conversation about "Is Portland losing its soul?" No. That's not inevitable. Let's do what Portland does. Which is when we see something that we don't like, we figure out how what to do.
We need in the mayor's seat someone with a big vision for Portland — that we haven't seen actually in a good long while. Which means what? For the person who's who slogging through day to day life of congestion and housing affordability crises, overcrowded classrooms, food deserts, whatever it is that you're up against in your daily life in Portland — without being able to maintain necessarily that 30,000 view — we need leadership. Someone in the Mayor's seat in particular who can say: Yeah, these are growing pains.
"People would say, 'A lot of this got under way 30, 40 years ago. What's next?' And I didn't have a clear answer. I didn't see anyone on the horizon with that answer either."
— Sarah Iannarone
It's like adolescence: just because you grow from a teenager to an adult, it don't doesn't mean you're not you. It's just a process that you go through. So what are we going to look like on the other side of these growing pains? I think we need a vision for that. You know, what's our next iteration of Portland going to be? You can't just be discouraged and bogged down in the problems that we currently face. Otherwise you know, solving some of those problems is going to be nearly insurmountable without a north star to guide us. Because I don't care what qualities of leadership you "bring to the task" — if you don't know the direction you're heading, how do you rally the people of Portland behind you and head in that direction? The way we did 40 years ago when our enemy at the door was the automobile, and we were convinced that what we needed to do was constrain sprawl.
From my day job at Portland State University I host leaders from around the world to come to study sustainability policy best practices. These are people who are experts either in developing policy for their own cities or implementing policy or coming up with technology or other solutions to make that urban transformation happen in their own cities. And they look and they say, "Well you've done a really good job here, Portland, and made a really nice place, but from the story that you're telling, a lot of this got under way, you know, 30, 40 years ago. So what's next?"
And when they would ask me that question, I didn't have a clear answer. I didn't see anyone on the horizon with that answer either. And I have some good ideas about what I think is next for Portland. So that's why I'm running for mayor.
So what are those ideas? What are, like, three or four characteristics of the Portland 30 years from now we don't have today?
It's equitable, number one. We need to understand that climate change is the pressing issue of our generation and that that is foremost a human rights issue. Right? Because whether or not humans are here, the planet is going to continue to go on. And if as a species we want to survive and thrive, we need to make sure that we're all in it together. So being an inclusive city, an equitable city, a city where it's not about growth at all costs but growth so that we can capture the benefits and continue to invest in our communities, our goals.
So what it does it look like in 30 years? We're fossil free. We're a post-carbon city, and we're not struggling to keep up. We laid the foundation so that we are leaders, economically out front when it comes to clean tech, green tech, infrastructure, the kind of smart technologies we need to be carbon free.
Equitable: What does it mean to be a place where the prosperity is equitably distributed and we're not hollowing out our middle class and having income and prosperity concentrated in the top one percent while we're growing and growing poverty and misery for people who are already least able to deal day to day because of this or that lack of resources and lack of abundance in their daily life.
And one of the things I'm talking about pretty actively is what we do about racism here. You and I mentioned briefly Trump on the way in the door. It's on everyone's minds right now. The fervor among Americans right now, it's almost without hope for some solution. And the racism and the biases are amplified in that atmosphere. And I think, once upon a time what Portland did was aspire to be an environmentally friendly place when other places weren't looking at that yet. They didn't understand that protecting the natural environment could be good for the economy, could be good for the people. We came up with that triumvirate of people and places and prosperity pretty early on and embraced it.
But what does that mean for us? If we are racist, we're not even able to begin to address how we're going to equitably distribute power and prosperity. Because there are people here who have no voice and no role in how these decisions are made that affect their lives every day. And I would like to see us become an actively anti-racist place. So that the same way we let Minneapolis get ahead of us in bike lanes, right? Great! Let everyone else get ahead of us in dismantling racism actively, through public policy, the same way that we actively use public policy to reinforce and establish racism.
I'm not sure I understood the the parallel. We were ahead on sustainability; we were behind on sustainability. You're saying we are behind on racism?
What I'm saying is that once we were a green leader. I'm saying that let's not necessarily have to be a leader in that. Because we need all the cities to be doing that. I don't think the leadership part is what we should be focused when it comes to sustainability any more. Do we need to have more green buildings than other cities? Why? Let's let all the cities have green buildings. Let's continue to innovate and share ideas. I mean, it's a global network and a global conversation about how cities are going to be "sustainable." What I'm saying is. Portland can get out in front of them by understanding there's social work to be done right now. And when we're a leader in that, we can we maintain our model status. Because now the rest of the world's going, "Wait a second. So first, you guys figured out how to build environmentally friendly places. And now you've got socially sustainable places as well? Now there's really something going on."
Because that local resiliency, that local prosperity, is what's going to protect us from an increasingly unstable global financial market in the same way that our climate resiliency is going to protect us from increasingly unstable climate change. Right? So they go hand in hand. And that's something we need to be intentional about and talk about strategically, not because it's the right thing to do but because it's the only thing to do. I've not heard a single candidate running for mayor talk about it in those terms.
Talk about what in which terms?
The equity, in terms of the basis of our future prosperity. You can't have one without the other, and that's what I'm saying climate change and and human rights are inextricable.
Great. How does transportation fit into all that?
My goodness. It's so central to everything we're trying to accomplish.
You know as an alternate transportation advocate, cycling advocate, the role that getting us out of single-occupancy vehicles is going to play, just to begin with. It's going to play not only in our public health, our mental health, our environmental health, but by helping us meet our greenhouse gas emission goals and livability, safety, psychology.
We need to be thinking about what is a car-free, or at least a post-internal-combustion single occupancy automobile future. We realize it's not sustainable, it's not working. It kills people. When I think about Vision Zero, when I think about more people dying on Portland's streets — as mayor my number one task is going to be public safety, right? We don't want people dying in our streets by any means. That makes the relationship to the automobile central.
What are our alternatives? Okay Portland. You want to be a climate-forward city? You want to be a socially sustainable and just society? Now what do you do about transportation? And how we answer those questions is going to secure our future.
So what are some specific steps we can take?
Well, we were laughing as we saw the Trib on the way in and I had heard you want to talk about Foster Road, out in my neighborhood. Let's go down to a real example. Out on Foster Road where my neighbors — they got approval in, what, 2012, from city council? There's been pushback actually right where down the block where I walk my dog every morning to get my coffee. The European furniture store owner a few weeks ago hung a very bright fluorescent sign to say "Call the mayor, this is horrible, this is horrible, the congestion is going to kill us, it's gonna eat us alive."
And then you saw this going viral as businesses along the street and then it comes up, well, so I sent a Facebook message: What's going on? Why are they so upset? The public process, I mean, we've got the buy-in and all this is ready to rock and roll? What's happening?
Oh, PDC has been talking to so and so, blah blah blah. The liaison for this and I'm thinking, Ugh. This is exactly what we need to not be having, these conversations. A woman posted something on my Facebook wall the other day about "how can you talk about getting automobiles off, don't you realize about my commute times and impact on business?" And I thought, we need to be talking about the data. We have clear evidence that suggests having more pedestrian traffic, having more bicycle traffic on the streets, can be far far better.
Most of the people in my neighborhood are still very very auto centric. How is this going to grow that neighborhood? How is that going to positively impact our business environment? And I don't see a healthy conversation about that. Even now when we should be so masterful at this. We've done so many projects like this around the city. How can we have this going to break down right now? To me that's unconscionable.
What is the city failing to do?
Well, first of all obviously this person doesn't feel if they were involved in the process, right, or they would have a clear understanding of the pros and cons from the get go. So somewhere along the way this person feels like perhaps they were left out process.
Isn't that going to be the case with every process, though? There are always going to be people who didn't go to the meeting, right? He's got a business to run.
What does civic engagement in the 21st century look like? Does everyone have to show up at a meeting? I think that outreach about that needs to be about "Here are the pros and cons and here are the limits in the possibilities." This person has off-street loading access. He's worried about freight and he actually has many freight options that are not gonna be largely affected by the transportation plan. The disconnect is this person isn't understanding. This means that we're not getting information to her or him that they need to be able to make a rational decision about what's going to be best for their business.
"These shared goals are the same. We want Foster Road to prosper. We want those businesses to prosper. No one doesn't want that."
— Sarah Iannarone
And if they do still have valid concerns and how are we addressing them, you know, I hear the same things about the Goat Blocks and the density that's going in there when you've got some pretty freight-heavy purveyors adjacent to that. And what's that what is the balance of trucks and commerce relative to the pedestrian, bicycle, gonna look like? We need to paint a clearer picture for the residents of Portland. We shouldn't be creating us versus them scenarios. We should be creating win-win-wins. These shared goals are the same. Right? We want Foster Road to prosper. We want those businesses to prosper. No one doesn't want that. So maybe one of the things we do: we put the freight information up at the top if we know that's going to be the biggest place of pushback. The same way as when they're trying to unclog Los Angeles's streets with the MoveLA project.
When it comes to traffic and transportation investments, though, people worry about gentrification. So you put the anti displacement measures at the top. The Foster streetscape plan isn't about the project. It's about the people and the businesses and the place. And we miss that connection sometimes. Especially the wonks who work downtown ard are worried about the red waves and the signal timing and all that. Because we do want to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of the system, but we need to always bear in mind that these are projects that foremost for communities. So they must serve communities.
So are you saying you come to the Foster Road business association and say "We are here to make this district more prosperous. That's our goal." And they say, "OK, great. What's your plan for doing that?" And then you have to say, "Oh, we're going to take this street to a turn lane and two lanes and a bike lane on each side." And they're like, "What is the connection there?"
Well that we obviously didn't make the connection in advance that increased pedestrian activity is better for business that more motorists. We did the exact same thing when we had pushback on the Transit Mall from downtown business. Still to this day I don't understand why we have an automotive lane on that transit mall. It's completely ineffective. In many ways it's unsafe, because the cyclists have no way to go. And skateboarders, they have to go four walks out of their way to get anywhere. You and I both know that you get off the Hawthorne Bridge and it's to nowhere. Right?
So yeah, we have to stop in some ways and and say wait a minute let's not make these decisions based on what the way things have always been done, but what are our shared goals? That Foster Area business association, they have a great organization. They come to the table first. You don't go to them after the citizen activist or the transportation activist has already put their ideas in. They already have buy-in.
The furniture store guy has a point, you know? He's an eastern European immigrant. [Iannarone later emailed to correct herself on this: the current generation of the Schleifer family were actually born in the United States.] Probably largely disconnected from American political process. He's probably largely disconnected from the civic engagement here in Portland. Maybe without that leisure time to attend the neighborhood association. How are we gonna make that system work for him? For most?
How indeed?
In some ways it's about meeting them where they're at. As someone who watched that process go for a very long time, I volunteered for that because I'm interested in transportation projects. And how do we bring the people to the table very early on?
It's going to be the same question as East Portland right you can't have PBOT going into East Portland and saying, "people, okay, so here are some of my technicians and here are some of my experts and let's do this." You have to go there and listen first. You go and gather the Foster area businesses together, you say "Hey we've heard some rumblings that your street's unsafe." You know, I remember it was Sam — I was out protesting at 80th and Foster Road because people were getting killed in the same pathway that my daughter walks back and forth to her friend's house.
This was during the Adams administration, you're saying?
Yeah. And we got the the blinking lights installed there after that, about $70,000. You have to be responsive to the needs of the people. It's not the projects first. It's about the community first. And if you understood Foster Road and the people were operating out there, like Buck from Stove Palace and Nick Storie who had the Bob White Theater for a while, and people like me who run businesses out there, even the Portland Mercado, right? Who are your customers? What are their needs? What is your vision? What is your plan? And then the transportation becomes a tool. And while we're doing that, that's when the experts come and lend the expertise. I've always thought that streetcar would be fantastic. I will probably get pushback for this because not everyone loves Streetcar, but as a development tool I think Streetcar on Foster would make good strong connections with the Lents Town Center which has struggled and which is very connected to that Green Line. Would help increase capacity for existing transit investments and grow business.
So there are ways where you can get you can think about things incrementally. Piloting things. Pick an intersection or two. Start small. I understand there are trade offs with regard to efficiency. But I think there are ways especially when you start thinking about some of the bigger arterials — so there are orphan state highways in the ways that we're gonna have to deal with them in the future — incremental is going to be I think, pilot projects are probably going to be one of the approaches we have to increasingly adopt to get some of the major transformative changes we need to make in the future.
What's an example of one of those major transformative changes that could use a pilot project to sort of communicate or research its effects?
Well. I think about 82nd Avenue a lot. Because my neighborhood abuts it. But also it's so symbolic, right? It's the symbolic divider between East Portland and the rest of Portland. And if there were a mayor right now, I want to hear them saying a few things right about our post-carbon future, equity, sustainability, but also bridging the divide. And how we grow in East Portland, grow sustainably there without a lot of displacement, is going to be, I think is key to our future. Because how that works is going to be a model for the rest of the world and how you retrofit your suburbs in the post-auto future. Think about that: because that form largely resembles a lot more of the rest of America than our beautiful 200-foot grid in the city center. That's a luxury that most places don't have. So one, so it's a way for us to be an innovatorive leader. Two, you've got some great resources on 82nd Avenue. You've got PCC at 82nd and Division. You've got a wonderful coalition in APANO and the Jade District and the Fubonn shopping center there. You've got a nice hotbed of activity. You think a little bit closer but my area where the folks at the Eastport Plaza have done great work over probably 20 years. There are neighborhood businesses in that Eastport Plaza, even though it has a strip mall aesthetic, you know, and even though there's a Walmart there. It's not this "us versus them" where you have these tiny bespoke boutiques versus the big box stores. There's a real mix.
So what so what does it look like for PBOT to actually go there and say, "We have some resources. And one of our goals is a city is to boulevard some of our major arterials to bring them down to more human scale, to make them safer for pedestrians." Again, not creating this transportation option dichotomy, but saying foremost we're thinking about safe, walkable, vibrant, economically thriving communities and neighborhoods.
"You start doing a little bit of road diet, some gradual streetscape, maybe some bicycle lanes or separated bikeways, right?"
— Sarah Iannarone on 82nd Avenue
So how do we pilot perhaps just a small stretch of 82nd between Division and Holgate, maybe? You've got PCC and the Jade District at one end, you've got Eastport Plaza at the other. You start doing a little bit of road diet, some gradual streetscape, maybe some bicycle lanes or separated bikeways, right? Not heavy, not huge projects, but slowly and incrementally, helping folks realize their own vision for what might be there. Don't go in with a preconceived notion of what needs to be there. And then also knowing that we've got a lot of interest in Powell, right? And so then you start to think about how can this be a catalyst for what the goals we're trying to achieve with Powell, the bus rapid transit that we're thinking about out there that's hitting an awful lot of community pushback especially with regard to the changes that they're seeing potentially happening in their communities. Gentrification. Displacement. Loss of frequent bus service. Stations being located much further apart, so people with limited mobility have to walk further to get to their stops. All of these concerns for communities. And so then thinking about, okay so how can we use the crossing of Powell there? How can we spread out so that we're starting to even just scale down a little bit from the automobile there so these aren't such shocking and traumatic transformations.
I'm not sure I understand what you're proposing when you say "scale down." What do you mean, "stretch out"?
Well, the street level amenities. So the pedestrian safety, the bicycle safety, some of the low-hanging fruit that you can get through bollards and street extensions and bioswales. Even if it barely affects the automobile traffic, psychologically we're starting to pull people out of the six-lane environments into — you're pulling back space from the automobile and reclaiming it for the humans.
You're saying you could use something like bollards and paint to change the angle of turning.
Yeah, just simple engineering street design. But what you're doing then is through that, you go based on the values of the people who were in those areas and say what are your foremost goals? Is it safety? Well then we'll make sure that what we're doing is increasing safety. Is it about efficiency? Well, fewer curb cuts would be safer and more efficient, so let's get people turning at the light. Just little things like that, we're based in the community goals. As opposed to saying "well, our transportation laws are we need to get this many people out of cars this fast, and that's gonna take y'all sacrificing." It's not about sacrificing, it's about winning. Especially in these places where you're having to bridge value sets. It's a lot harder. I mean, I make a huge sacrifice living at say 63rd and Foster. Commuting an hour a day by bicycle or transit. As opposed to having an automobile. Because actually I can go much much quicker in a car until I hit about 20th street maybe is where the congestion actually starts. Why would people, unless ideologically they embrace that — what's their tradeoff? Why get out of the automobile?
Just money.
Right? So we need to make it affordable, we need to make it attractive. And that's not us giving them what we think they want. It's about what do you need here. When I hear the BRT conversation, the transportation wonk and the city planner in me goes, "Of course you want BRT! Don't you realize the development potential in the blah blah blah and the blah blah blah that you're going to experience from this?" But the committee member in me says "Well, your concerns are real and we can't focus on BRT at all costs." So maybe even reverse the process of the bus rapid transit. What would happen if we actually said "We value this so much, we're going to start out at Mount Hood [Community College] and come back to 82nd? We're gonna do it slowly. And we're gonna do it your way. Places where the cost may be a little lower for us.
So you mention a bunch of changes to 82nd and Powell, all of which would have to happen over ODOT's dead body, or with a bunch of money that the city doesn't have to spend on the street. So where do we get the money for that?
Well, one we need to have some serious conversations with ODOT about those orphan highways and how we're gonna wrestle them back as streets in our city. I know living on a street that has the scale of something like Foster Road: those are our city streets, not highways. Especially as we grow. What's that conversation ODOT going to look like? It's going to look the same way as the furniture store on Foster Road. What's in it for you? What can we do for you, and how are we going to pay for it? That's why I think we need to think about the systems development charges and some of the other things that we can do to spur development, that's way where our real estate finance as a city, it can come into play. And again it's because piloting: we can do a lot more, we can we can do a lot in a little area right with local dollars, in ways that we couldn't do whole swaths. But then once we've got buy-in, and I think you have a little bit more saying, well, you were able to improve safety outcomes here, we have money for safety improvements."
Which budgets are these?
ODOT's. With money that they're already spending on certain things we can then legitimize the fact that we will have these outcomes, it's just going to be a little bit different. And to be honest with you I'm not sure what those negotiations are going to be like for how we get those dollars. Part of it is going to be working with the state and how the VMT — is it an excise fee? I'm not sure what they call it.
Something like that, yeah. Whatever replaces the gas tax.
Yeah. That needs to be going to urban areas. I know it's a hard thing in the urban-rural divide but the intensity and use of urban areas — it's so high.
You're saying the revenue needs to go to urban areas?
Yeah. We need to have an increase in the revenue in urban areas because the intensity of use on our city streets. And I do not like perpetuating the urban rural divide. It's actually something I think that if I were going to be governor of Oregon or something, it's something I would have to work really really hard at. We have to think about that distribution of resources. But also starting to think about how do we get users to pay? Some people talk about licensing bicycles and things like that. I'm like, are you kidding? Other cities are paying people to cycle because cycling is so much less taxing on our infrastructure and so it's less taxing on our environment, I can't even get behind that it all. But what does it mean to incentivize behavior we want and disincentivize behavior we don't? Tolling. We don't talk about tolling here, it's very unpopular. As someone who grew up on the East Coast, just like sales tax, it's hard to imagine life without tolling. I feel like I'm kind of a free rider because we don't collect user fees.
"I am not anti-automobile. I want people to be able to use whatever option they need. But we don't need to necessarily be clogging up the streets with single occupancy vehicles."
— Sarah Iannarone
So what's the road from here to tolling? Where would that happen?
Let's ask everyone to guess: it's between Vancouver and Portland on I-5. How we figure out what we're gonna do across that river is going to be a game changer. And you know maybe make one great way would be to toll the automobiles and make really very affordable transit. Those cars coming from Washington — don't need them downtown, we don't want them downtown. And I am not anti-automobile. I don't want to be positioned as that. I want people to be able to use whatever option they need. But we don't need to necessarily be clogging up the streets with single occupancy vehicles. We need to be moving freight. Commuters especially have many other options in and out of the city center.
You support the gas tax. If the gas tax fails, what is your best alternative to it and what's what's the next step in the short run to keep the pavement from falling apart? If the gas tax succeeds, what is the next step after expires after four years?
I think we'll have to go for another four years. I'm optimistic that it's going to pass — we're into such dire straits now, that the opportunity costs of not maintaining what we have now, it's gonna be just horrendously more expensive in the future. I think people polled get that for the large part.
I think eight years — in that time I'm hoping that something like vehicle miles traveled tax will be more feasible technologically. There's been some libertarian concerns expressed with regard to privacy but I think we can overcome that. If we get this Smart Cities grant from the feds, which would be a nice innovation seed, we can probably start to look at some of that.
I assume you'd envision that at the state level, a VMT fee? And you're saying a long term plan is switch to a VMT and get the state to give more money to the cities?
Yep. Because we'd have data. So we'd be able to know where the VMC was going right and you can spend your dollars accordingly. I mean that's one of the beautiful things about data-driven decision making — things like that so that we're not be making all these decisions so politically, us versus them, haves versus nots, but that we're in it together. We can get our share.
One of the eternal questions of the transportation world is how much you spend on making bad areas decent and how much do you spend on making good areas better. You talked about the pressure of listening to communities — there's been a huge process in East Portland to get the's Portland action plan and mobility plan passed. We've had that conversation; we have a big list of stuff. We just haven't spent the money to do it. Same thing in the central city: there's a ton of pressure to improve things for biking and transit into the places where people are doing it the most. You can't do both. You'd like to do both. How do you choose with one dollar where to go?
Well, when I think about one dollar I like to solve two problems. If we do make investment in the city center, I think the question we ask ourselves is this. Where our markets are hot — employment markets, real estate markets — we're always going to have better return on that single dollar. If we opt to go to a place with higher ROI, how are we capturing the value in that and making sure it's invested in the place where the market fears to tread?
So you make a bunch of money off selling the post office site and —
I actually don't think we should sell the post office site. I think we should lease it. And I think we should actually capture the value of that land lease first. What does it look like to capture value in one part of the city that's thriving and attracting investment, capture that intentionally, so you have top outcomes in places —
So you use that to connect blocks in Gateway.
Gateway, Lents. Again, around our education centers and job centers. To talk about Gateway and Lents just a little bit, because I do have some interesting ideas having served on the PDC strategic development plan. One thing that's not particularly popular — it wasn't particularly popular around that table — is the fact that I don't think that every single place in Portland needs to be a compact walkable neighborhood. I've talked about having them from "edge to edge." I think there are certain places for focusing on as transit-connected job centers, innovation centers, employment centers. Some of that's almost campus-like if you build it at a district scale. With some of that, we can let the bar go a little lower just because we solve our last mile probably through cycling or car sharing or things like that.
I guess what I'm talking about is changing the mindset a little bit from not having to be compact. The people of Lents probably aren't going to love that.
But you're saying it's more important for it to be a job center than for it to be walkable.
I think there are places in it that can be walkable but I think adjacent to the transit investments we've made already on the Green Line in Lents — think about the ballfield site over in Lents, off the town center. That's a huge opportunity for a campus site. There's a lot of things that could be happening.
I don't get bogged down in the details. What it is is thinking creatively, outside the box, about Portland's future and how that relates to where do we have the existing transportation infrastructure? How can we intensify that, and what is the low hanging fruit around that? I don't think every single thing needs to be necessarily the most glamorous project, too. Jersey barricades go a long way in keeping a cyclist safe from an automobile, right? There's an awful lot of places, especially in East Portland, where a nice wide lane separated from that fast moving traffic, a Jersey barricades between a motorist or a truck and a bicycle would go a very very long way for very very few dollars and be a hugely symbolic action on the part of the city to say, "we value your life, it's safe to bike between your home and your school and your office.
That gets back to the the question about central versus outskirts. I mean, jersey barriers are cheap compared to some things, but they're very expensive compared to paint. When you're making the decision of whether to increase the number of people biking in the central city versus increase the tolerance for even thinking about biking on 167th, how do you think about that?
"Where are people dying? That's what you ask yourself. And then you say "How do we stop that?" And that's where you start to look at investments."
— Sarah Iannarone
Where are people dying? That's what you ask yourself. And then you say "How do we stop that?" And that's where you start to look at those investments. Because if it's just the can of paint and political will, then put that where the people aren't dying. Where people are dying, you put the Jersey barricade. Because what we need to think about, if we're going to truly envision Vision Zero, it's about not having people dying on our streets. And that equity there is that some people don't have a safe life. I know again when I send my daughter out across Foster Road, it doesn't matter if she's in the crosswalk. Those motorists don't necessarily see her and she has to see them. And she's on her phone, she's Snapchatting. It terrifies me. When it's symbolic and it's about respect, that's where I think you can you go with things that are smaller.
How can we do some really clever things in East Portland if we do get the bus rapid transit, what can those stations look like? My understanding is that probably out there we don't need a dedicated right of way for the bus but that closer to the city center we should, and ny understanding that in the plans right now there's no plans for dedicated right of way. And I wonder, what is the point of BRT without a dedicated right of way? So my thoughts would be, if you start we don't need a dedicated right of way, it buys us a little time too, to get Portlanders to buy into BRT where we're really going to need it.
One more PDC question. There's talk about how do you fund the PDC after the URAs expire. One of the things talked about are parking garages in Old Town and the Central East Side as future revenue opportunities. What's your take on whether there should be public support for those garages?
Well, as a city we should not be subsidizing the automobile, ever, as a matter of public policy. So if automobiles aren't paying for themselves, and automobile centric activities aren't paying for themselves, we don't put public dollars in. I think there's things you can do with dynamic parking, tiered fee structures.
There's more demand at 7 p.m., so we raise the price at 7 p.m.
Yeah, sure. The technology's coming. In some instances it's already there. And we can we can capture a lot of that value. When it comes to the parking structure, you know I don't want I don't want to drill down into the details of that particular project and agreement. That convention center hotel took a lot longer than it should have because of some political realities and I'm not sure what the role that parking garage played in that tradeoff, you know. But my administration would be about intentionally not subsidizing the automobile as a matter of public policy.
We're seen as a platinum standard when it comes to transportation around the world. I understand this uniquely among my opponents: that the rest of the world is watching what we do right now and following our lead, whether we like it or not. Which means you're on your best behavior and you model behavior even if sometimes it's a little bit challenging. Which means, one, actively one stating the intention that we're going to stop subsidizing the automobile. Because it doesn't meet any of our goals. It doesn't meet our equity goals, it doesn't meet our economic goals, it doesn't mean our environmental goals.
Here's what we are going to do. Do we build parking structures as a city? Maybe sometimes. I think in some places where we're trying to meet our affordable housing goals, allowing developers to not have to provide parking, getting rid of those parking minimums, maybe we do need a district parking area. But that could be an economic generator. It doesn't have to have a net cost.
But doesn't that end up subsidizing automobiles?
Because we're not going to pay for it as a city. We'll make sure that we allow them, and that districts can have them if they need or want them, but there should be some basic environmental standards, maybe there's active use on the ground floor. Because we have to understand: people are not going to give up their cars. We're going to have to transition toward electric vehicles, which I am very much in favor of. But even those, where do people put them? That's why I'm saying that for our affordability goals, having district parking that's on the edges of places is not a bad idea. Look at the popularity of park-and-ride at the Orange Line. That was full in like a week and Eastmoreland was already complaining people were parking on the streets that had been empty before, because everyone has like three car garages in that neighborhood. I think it actually looks quite lively there right now — as someone who doesn't live in Eastmoreland I have the luxury of not saying that. But structures like that I think are great. They have transportation goals. But we didn't have enough money for that to do what we knew the demand would be. Well, how do we get those dollars in advance when those are our goals to get people to use transit? It's just about being intentional about what you're fighting for.
You've said several times that you want to envision a car-free central city, but I don't have a clear idea of what you see as the steps to get to that.
This goes back to me talking about what does it mean for Portland to be a model. We look at what does it mean for Oslo to be car-free in the city center, and this notion of car-free cities? I think that we need to start symbolically with a small part of our city center. And you would probably build it around the places where the existing infrastructure is tightest. The Transit Mall. And it wouldn't be huge. I mean, you think about the French Quarter in New Orleans, it's about 16 by 16 blocks. And it's almost a car-free zone just because of the pedestrian activity. What would it look like for us to have a portion of the city that was just not an auto center. I don't think it's going to happen by 2018. But about 10 years? I think we can work towards something like that, get that well underway. Get the business community to buy in. How would that feed into tourism? How would that feed into our green marketing globally? I don't know how we can keep calling ourselves a green leader when it's taking me 45 minutes to get from the bus stop at 4th and Madison to the foot of the Hawthorne Bridge.
What does it mean for us to just unclog our downtown visually, symbolically, but also functionally? I think it would be very very effective and it would put us back on top again as one of those cities that's willing to try new things even when it seems like business as usual.
There's some little spots around the city that I think we can begin to pilot some car-free zones.
OK. Let's talk about housing affordability for a bit. It's a huge issue. The aspect we focus on specifically at BikePortland is proximity. The parts of Portland that are farthest out of reach for most people are the ones that are the most bikeable, walkable, transit-friendly. Are there steps that we can take, or do you think we should be taking any steps, to make it possible for more people who are not as rich to live in those areas?
Well I think what you do is you make sure that housing transportation costs are included in the same metric when you're looking at affordability. I mean that's something other cities have known for a long time. Every household experiences it. Like, I can live and pay 70 percent of my income to housing if I have zero transportation cost. And plus the time, you have to add the time variable. If I walk two minutes to work and then I have eight modes of transit, including car-share, Lyft and Uber within a minute of my smartphone, of course my transportation costs are going to be minimal.
What we need to be doing is making sure that that's combined into a single variable. It's also about connectivity. I think what happens when the further you get out in our network — which is, you know, hub and spoke — we haven't really realized our goals for multi-centricity yet, because the Green Line we went with the best available option, that ODOT right of way there, so it's not super connected.
On the highway.
Right. So we haven't realized a lot of development potential there there are a lot of forgone opportunities there. Which meant that that hasn't created a kind of vibrancy around the stations that we need. It's about intensifying the investments we do do — the density we do do — the projects around the existing transportation infrastructure to use that we can keep flooding the outer neighborhoods with as frequent bus service as possible. You know, buses really are the capillaries in the system that are going to get people closer to their homes, their jobs and their school. So we really need to make sure that we're focusing density in the areas — I know a lot of people are talking about density in the transit corridors in town centers. A lot of people are talking about, oh we need to have density everywhere in town. And I think density all around the city is very important, but focusing on the centers and corridors is going to be key. Because then we can keep the transit efficient, affordable. Because it's the frequency of service that's key.
So you're saying the route to affordability isn't necessarily to make it cheaper to live in the current, dense walkable areas. It's to create more dense, walkable transit-friendly areas by running transit lines in places where we can create nodes? Is that it?
"In the current dense areas it's already affordable and accessible, because the reason that they're currently dense is because they have good transit."
— Sarah Iannarone on housing affordability
In the current dense areas it's already affordable and accessible, because the reason that they're currently dense is because they have good transit. So when you're thinking about what's next Portland and what's going to get us through these growing pains, we need to increase supply, right? And some of the arguments that we just, you know, open up the field and increase supply like across the board. And what I'm saying is and what the planning bureau is looking at as well and what I just worked on for over a year in the mixed use zones is that where you look at the density in the zoning in the corridors and transit centers. That we do what intensify in those areas. What does it mean to have a buffer around that, so extending out into neighborhoods a little bit, where you're stepping down the density into the neighborhoods, it's not just that wind tunnel effect on say Mississippi or Division but you're actually growing this way. Which is going to be a little bit of a transition for some of those neighborhoods. But thinking about what that does is help us meet our densely goals. While we're able to provide the transit because you're still concentrated. The more diffuse we are, the harder it's going to be to have those concentrated. I mean, we do need to have density all around, but concentrated density needs to be the way to do it.
How many stories does that mean at the peak?
Well it depends on what area you're in. I mean I think they're doing a lovely job with high density in the Lloyd District.
But that wouldn't fit in Montavilla very well.
Well, that depends on what the future of Montavilla looks like. Ask someone what the Lloyd District looked like 20 years ago: a sprawling one-story thing. Now look at the Lloyd Center.
Why did we think Hassalo on Eighth was a good idea? It's an Eco District. It's got a low carbon footprint. The design is gorgeous. It fits with our goals of livability, walkability. I think there's something like something like 800 units that that are going to be a pretty affordable rate by market standards that close to the city center, the Pearl District and other amenities. It's meeting an awful lot of our goals. Ten years from now, 20 years from now, that may be the same reality for Montavilla and some people out there might love that. But what that wasn't doing was degrading something that was already there. It's seen largely as an improvement.
When I moved here 20 years ago, 39th Street, which is now Cesar Chavez, felt like the suburbs. I took a job as an apartment manager out there to save enough money to buy my first home. Our friends were like, you're moving where? 39th and Gladstone? ANd now I think as I pass 39th and Gladstone on my bicycle and still have like two miles, three miles to go, I think "Wow, how times have changed." But what does that mean for thinking about 92nd and Foster? Some beautiful density there would be great. Especially if we can can connect up so that that Green Line becomes a viable option. It takes a long time to get anywhere even remotely close to the city center on the Green Line.
So just to clarify on infill stuff, you talk about "density everywhere": are you talking about the sort of missing middle garden apartments stuff, or are you talking about a more general upzone of R5?
Oh, no no no no. I think you do the bigger projects in the corridors.
So you're saying you keep R5 more or less the way it is.
Yes. [Iannarone later emailed to clarify: "I do not think we put 5 story buildings in R5 zones, no. But when it comes to infill, I support the work of the Residential Infill Project and their proposal to increase the "missing middle" in R5 zones, especially if we insist that density happens in buffer zones closest to transit corridors."]
My idea for my idea for the neighborhoods is a little different something folks have talked about a little bit. And. And do please tread carefully on the Lents and Gateway discussions too because those are just outside the box thinking too, those aren't necessarily plans. And this is just thinking outside the box again. But I went and spent the night at Hazelnut Grove — I'm going to call it an intentional community; some people are calling it a homeless encampment — in the Overlook neighborhood. What surprised me the most about that was people finding their own pathways out of homelessness and building tiny houses was the aspiration. And what you would see was someone who was sleeping on the sidewalk outside Nordstrom one day somehow being invited to join this community. Zero-carbon-footprint tiny homes for $1500 using reclaimed building materials. Things like that we need to be making space for even in neighborhoods. So what does it look like to have multiple ADUs behind homes. What does it look like to take multiple existing big structures and cut them into multiple dwellings and maybe even change to use at the ground level if it's an older Victorian that's gonna get torn down or sold for $800,000 and made completely unaffordable. Can we cut that into smaller units and somehow maintain the affordability? Things like that. So it's not just the cottage apartments, though I do think it's important to have that base level. It's about creative solutions.
The gas tax calls for about $3 million for neighborhood greenways, about $4 million protected bike lanes in the four years. [Note: I got this wrong. It's actually $2.4 million for greenways, $3.2 million for protected lanes.] How do you feel that is in terms of the scale of investment needed for major bike infrastructure citywide? Do you want more or less or is that about right?
So seven total? For four years?
It's way too low.
So will you aim for a larger gas tax in the next round?
I think we need to balance the maintenance versus some of the safety infrastructure investments. I think about the trade off between street maintenance and other things. I'd like to see that move closer to 50/50 and I'm guessing it's not 50/50.
It's 44 or so.
Recreation. Is there anything that you see as a way forward on off-road like mountain biking, singletrack?
Well I think the enthusiasts know best. I have to say I'm a utility cyclist. After I commute by bicycle, I don't tend to ride as much like some of the hard core people do. I run around and walk for fun. But I know that environmental conservation and mountain bikers have come head to head a lot. Especially in Forest Park. I think there's probably ways of thinking that maybe they don't have to be in some of our more pristine environmental areas would probably be the tradeoff. And maybe that's a great places where you have more sprawling areas to think about. What would it mean to have wonderful biking trails and things like that in East Portland, especially since you can't ride your bike there.
So you said it might make sense not to put people in the most pristine areas. Where you send people instead?
I think you look at the underutilized spaces and those kind of hidden bonus spaces.
Any specific examples?
I don't really have any specific examples.
OK. What is a belief that you have about policy that you're most afraid is wrong?
At my core? That that focusing on social sustainability will indeed make us prosper. It's we I know that ethically, theoretically, sociologically it's what we need to be doing. Can we truly impact the market? Can we truly shape our destiny by focusing on what we know is good? Can we do well by doing good — you know the B Corps, the social sustainability, the equity? Will it be enough? We have to go there. We have no choice.
What was your first bike?
Oh my goodness. My first bike was a 10-speed Schwinn with those super super — well, no, that was my first new bike, because I grew up a little bit poor. So my first first bike that I learned to ride bike on was a red banana seat with a big, what do you call, moustache handlebars and streamers. I love riding my bike. Being in a campaign, I don't have much time to ride. But I'm one of those people who's a joy bike rider. Pure joy. I sing and smile. Look how happy I am, I'm just talking about my first bike! I can remember like climbing the hill and you get to go down it, wchooo.
I'm sure there'll be lots of Pedalpalooza rides looking forward to a mayoral candidate.
Well, Bud still does one!
That's right, yeah.
But maybe I will, if I'm a mayoral candidate — my favorite bike hills or something like that.
This is the third and final long interview transcript we'll run before the May 17 primary, but our election coverage continues. At the suggestion of readers, we've also done a one-hour interview with candidate David Schor. Look for the audio and summary of that conversation next week. And stay tuned for further coverage.
— Michael Andersen, (503) 333-7824 – firstname.lastname@example.com
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Correction 4/2: Due to a transcription error, an earlier version of this post had Iannarone referring to "Bob" as the owner of the Stove Palace. It's Buck.


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Kudzu Is an Anti-Androgen and Hair Growth Promoter
In traditional Chinese Medicine, kudzu – a quick-growing vine native to China and Japan – is commonly used to treat alcoholism and hangover. This may be due to its potential to increase blood levels of alcohol when taken with an alcoholic beverage. Indeed, at least one study found that giving kudzu to heavy drinkers resulted in lower alcohol consumption (link).
The name kudzu encompasses at least five different species of the plant genus Pueraria. While all of them have very similar properties and are can be used for their medicinal purposes, the most often mentioned species are Pueraria lobata and Pueraria thomsonii. The various species contain a significant amount of isoflavones, which may at least partly be behind their use as a treatment for alcoholism.
Isoflavones, however, also have other uses. Because of their slight estrogenic effect, isoflavones from sources such as soy have been studied as a cure for hair loss. The idea is that isoflavones can inhibit 5-alpha-reductase, which converts testosterone into DHT. Since DHT binds to androgen receptors more potently than testosterone, DHT is a major cause of hair loss in genetically predisposed individuals.
Although the root part of the plant is often used, a recent study showed that the flowers of Pueraria thomsonii were much more effective in inhibiting 5-alpha-reductase than the roots of Pueraria lobata (~51% vs. ~7%). The flowers were powdered and made into a 50% ethanol extract, which was then applied onto the backs of mice after a testosterone treatment (link).
Applying the flower extract improved hair growth in a dose-dependent manner. The mice that got the largest dose (5 mg/day) after testosterone had a hair growth score similar to the control mice that were not treated with testosterone. In other words, the kudzu treatment reversed almost all of the hair loss effects of testosterone.
The authors also applied the extract on C3H/He mice without the testosterone to see whether it would promote hair growth independently of an anti-androgenic effect. The higher dose was almost as effective as minoxidil in promoting hair growth. Although the mechanism was not clear, the authors note that the flowers have been shown to have an angiogenetic effect.
Like soy, kudzu contains significant amounts of the isoflavone daidzein, daidzin and genistein. However, kudzu also contains an isoflavone called puerarin, which is not found in soy. Furthermore, Pueraria thomsonii flowers contain both soyasapones (one of the main components of soy beans) and kaikasaponins (not found in soy), making it rather unique.
I've seen a couple of soaps and shampoos that list kudzu as an ingredient, but I doubt that the amounts are large enough to truly make a difference. If you want to try kudzu topically, you might have better luck buying an extract in powder form and making your own topical. Another possibility is simply taking it orally. There is, after all, evidence that dietary isoflavones promote hair growth.
For more information on hair growth, see these posts:
Biotin Goes Back on the Menu
Soy Isoflavones and Chili Pepper for Hair Growth – Experiment Update
Topical Retinoids Increase Hair Growth in Most People
Zinc Pyrithione Reduces Shedding and Moderately Promotes Hair Growth


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Experts hired by Apple and Samsung explained and justified their differing damages claims to a California jury Monday as the latest battle between the two smartphone giants moves closer to a conclusion.
The two companies have been arguing in front of a jury for four days over the amount of money Samsung should pay to Apple for infringement of five of Apple's patents in 13 models of Samsung smartphones and tablets. Apple wants US$380 million and Samsung is arguing that $52 million is a fairer amount.
The question of damages is in front of the court after Judge Lucy Koh ruled a jury miscalculated damages when it considered the matter in a case last year. That case confirmed Samsung's infringement of the patents in multiple phones and tablets, and the jury ordered Samsung should pay just over $1 billion. Judge Koh cut $450 million from the award because of the bad jury math. The current trial is re-evaluating the damages. The patent infringement ruling stands and that aspect is not being argued again.
The court heard first on Monday from Samsung's damages expert, Michael Wagner, under questioning from Apple's lawyers. On Friday he told the court that he disagreed with all of the conclusions of Apple's damages expert, Julie Davis.
Apple says it would have sold an additional 360,000 iPhones if Samsung hadn't used its patented technology in its phones and part of the payment it wants covers its lost profits in those lost sales.
On Monday, Wagner repeated his assertion that Apple wouldn't have won additional sales. Samsung is arguing that consumers pick its phones for many reasons, chief among them the larger screens, the desire to use Android or Google services and longer battery life. But the patented features don't influence buying decisions.
The Apple patents in question cover the phone's ability to automatically switch between single and multitouch gestures, the "rubber-band" effect that makes the screen bounce when coming to the limit of scrolling, and the effect of a tap on the screen to re-center the display after zooming.
Whether Apple lost any sales will be one of the first questions for the jury to answer because it has a direct impact on the size of the damages award that will be made.
The two experts also argued over how much money Samsung made from selling the 13 infringing products. The question on basic profits centered around how certain expenses incurred by Samsung should be attributed -- to some of the infringing phones or to the mobile phone division in general.
It's probably more detail than the eight jury members ever wanted to know about the ins and outs of the mobile phone business, and it was also the last time they'd be hearing it. The two sides rested their cases just before the court took a lunch break.
The court is set for closing arguments Tuesday. Each side will have 90 minutes, then, after a lunch break, the jury is scheduled to begin its deliberations.
The case is 11-01846, Apple v. Samsung, at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
In a separate ruling in the patent infringement case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Monday said that Judge Koh erred when she denied Apple's request for an injunction on sales of Samsung products that were found to infringe Apple patents.
She had ruled that the monetary damage was enough compensation for Apple in that case. The appellate court found that parts of her ruling were correct, but sent the case back to her to reconsider Apple's arguments that it was damaged by Samsung's patent infringement, which may warrant an injunction.
Martyn Williams covers mobile telecoms, Silicon Valley and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Martyn on Twitter at @martyn_williams. Martyn's e-mail address is firstname.lastname@example.com